13-Week Rewrite, Week Two: The New Beginning

Ok, after last week, you now have a more specific outline. You’ve followed all your story beats all the way through, and imagined the most compelling order of events through which to tell your story. So now you’re ready to dive into the rewrite of your beginning.

This week, you address the material from your first sentence to the “inciting incident,” the event that drives your heroine into action to solve the story problem.

Goal-Tending Your Rewrite

Personally, I’m a fan of goal-tending. I like to set goals, and then mark my progress against those milestones.

So what I do at this stage is take my total page-count and divide it by twelve (the number of weeks ahead of me at this stage). In the case of my own present Work-in-Progress, that’s 338 / 12 = 28 (rounded down). This is the number of pages I’ll be revising in…